I use calibre as well and it's excellent. The only thing I think should have some attention is the awful interface.
- dark theme and switch the icon theme to monstre
- remove toolbar buttons you don't use like help/donate/news etc. so that it's quite minimal and streamlined
- edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
- no splash-screen
The preference pages remain a bit of a headache to navigate but it's not like you are fiddling with those too often and importantly, it does have plentiful configuration to do what you want.
And if you run into a problem, you'll probably get a response from Kovid faster than any company. Overall, thank you Kovid for years of hard work!
> - edit the ebook reader css to add some padding / line-spacing to fit your taste and use a font like Libre Baskerville
Where/how do I find those options? I found other CSS in the Preference pages, but not the ebook reader css.
2. Click the top or hit escape to show the menu and open up the preferences.
My current settings are:
- Colors: off-white background and dark grey text - I tend to pick these per device given different brightness / temperature of the display
- Page Layout: margins - left/right: 100px, top/bottom: 75px
- Fonts: I get Libre Baskerville from Google Fonts. I believe I choose a different font on Windows because each OS's rendering is slightly different. For me it's a matter of getting the font-weight just right so that it's not oppressive to the eye, distracting or hard to read but just right and it's a combination of the font, colour, size and how the OS renders. My goal is that it feels like the words on the page just fall into my eyes without effort.
- Style: This is where you can write css. (complaints about how bad my css is will fall on deaf ears!) The hack job I have on this machine is:
p
{
line-height: 1.5em !important;
font-size: 0.854em !important;
padding-bottom: 25px;
text-indent: 35.868px !important;
}
div
{
line-height:1.5em;
padding-top: 1em;
}
line-height: 1.5em;
Some ebooks have hardcoded styles that force ugly formatting. Fortunately Calibre lets you edit ebooks so you can just open them up and delete their custom css.
3. A few other things I remove are i) columns from the grid view like rating/publisher/series ii) categories on the left like language/format - I only use author/tags. Once you remove all the things you don't use, it's a neat minimal app.
Step a new user through setting up Calibre to do something as simple as syncing to a e-reader with the functionality a user would normally expect, like displaying/syncing their reading progress.
Or just watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off" and then a bunch of other folks get into the weeds describing the mess of plugins and shit you need to do it.
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/showthread.php?t=296205
I managed to get my e-reader to sync reading position to Calibre but it required a lot of frustrating work trying to follow tutorials on mobiread...creating custom fields and code snippets and praying that the whole thing won't break some time in the future.
It's probably the single most commonly wanted feature for a user looking at an e-book library management tool. That and syncing to their e-reader's shelves.
God help you if you want to use Goodreads...
> watch Goyal tell a new user "you can't do that, use the builtin reader if you want reading progress synced, fuck off"
... which seems to be a quote that you just made up. I might be wrong (maybe you meant to link to another thread and mixed up your links, or maybe the link you provided wasn't supposed to actually be evidence for the quoted part), but it seems like not.
This is a horrible practice, and you should stop.* (It's actually against the rules on HN[1][2], but you shouldn't do it anywhere. It's lame.)
* Yes, even in circumstances where you profess to have no intent of misleading people and are just "paraphrasing"—that's not how paraphrasing works to begin with, and the person's own words should be sufficient[3] to indict if they are in fact sufficient to indict them.
1. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13600284#13602947>
2. <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15890551#15890822> (you'll need showdead turned on)
3. e.g. <https://bugs.launchpad.net/calibre/+bug/2011720#yui_3_10_3_1...>
Truth is, Calibre is a hard project to run, the man has been doing it himself, and he is super responsive and helpful in forums.
Every thread about Calibre a has a comment like this shitting on Goyal based on one or two of his comments, and then there are some comments that talk about how helpful he is: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32052669
How could anyone support Goodreads seeing as their api is closed off? Thankfully calibre has the goodreads-sync plugin which still works as well as it does.
Otherwise the core app's UI looks fine to me personally, though some of the plugins make some, unusual, choices.
Stick to your todo list apps and stay in your lane.